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Ultimate Chinese (Mandarin) Beginner-Intermediate (CD/Book) (LL(R) Ultimate Basic-Intermed)
Average Customer Rating:   
List Price:
$79.95
Asia Trips Trips Price:
$50.37
Your Savings: $ 29.58 ( 37% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Living Language
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 495.182421
EAN: 9781400021031
Format: Unabridged
ISBN: 1400021030
Label: Living Language
Manufacturer: Living Language
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 393
Publication Date: 2004-08-24
Publisher: Living Language
Release Date: 2004-08-24
Studio: Living Language
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Editorial Reviews:
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Ultimate Mandarin Chinese has everything you need to learn Chinese from scratch or to revive the Chinese that you learned years ago. This course combines conversation and culture in an easy-to-follow, enjoyable, and effective format. It's the perfect way to learn Chinese for school, travel, work, or personal enrichment.
Ultimate Chinese Beginner-Intermediate includes:
•40 lessons in a comprehensive 416-page textbook:
Each lesson contains a lively and authentic dialogue, vocabulary, grammar and usage, step-by-step character writing, cultural highlights, and plenty of practice. The first ten lessons also include special pronunciation sections that will have you speaking right from the beginning. The book also contains review sections, readings, supplemental vocabulary sections, appendixes on essential Chinese grammar, and a Chinese-English/English-Chinese glossary.
•8 hours of recordings with an ingenious two-step approach:
Learn at home: Listen to the first set of recordings as you follow along in your textbook. Immerse yourself in Chinese while you listen and repeat with the all-Chinese recordings, and learn conversation, grammar, vocabulary, and more
Learn on the go: Then practice, review, and expand upon what you’ve learned with the second set of recordings. An instructor will guide you through each lesson, and since no reading is required, you can listen in the car, on the train, at the gym…anywhere!
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Capable instuction, but expensive for what it offers
Comment: The dialogues in Ultimate Chinese are natural-sounding and current (unlike many outdated textbooks for Mandarin Chinese) but the high price of this book/CD set makes it a considerable investment in 2008, when an abundance of audio and video resources for learning Mandarin Chinese are already available online at little to no cost. Also, serious students of the language - people taking a college-level course, for example - will find the lack of emphasis on reading and writing frustrating.
Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not good for beginners
Comment: I have some experience with Mandarin (my mom speaks it fluently) and decided to pick up this course to brush up on my skills. By the time I reached chapter 3, I was extremely grateful for my previous exposure (home, high school and college) because of problems with the book. For example, in chapter 3, the dialog includes the following words: kan4, qu4, tui4 xiu1, yi3 hou4, jia1 ren2, da4 xue2. The problem is the words are in the English translation of the dialog but are not included in the vocabulary section of the lesson. Since Chinese grammar isn't always the same as English grammar, it can be challenging to determine the definition based upon context. This can be frustrating to a beginner.
There's one sentence in chapter 3 that reads, "wo3 mei4mei da4xue2 bi4yi4 yi3hou4, xiang3 xue2xi2 yi1shu4". When translated literally it reads, "My younger sister college graduated later, wants to study medicine." The actual English translation in the book is, "When my younger sister graduates from college, she is thinking about studying medicine." Because the word yi3hou4 is missing from the vocabulary section, there's no way to determine which word it represents in the English translation. The word actually means "later" or "after" but is used to represent the word "when" in the sentence. How is a beginner supposed to know this?
I realize that this is just in chapter three, but I found a similar issue in chapter 2. So based upon 2 chapters in the book, I can only assume that I will see more problems.
If you decide to buy this course, be prepared to use other resources, dictionaries, Internet, or friends to help you understand some of the lessons.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Book and CD's probably too advanced for some students of Mandarin
Comment: At one time or another, I briefly studied German, Spanish, Russian and Latin so I am not new to learning a language. Notice I said "studied." I no longer know those languages except for some Spanish phrases.
I planned to go to China and wanted to learn some common phrases in Mandarin. So I signed up with a tutor who helped me learn the four tones for all the consonants and vowels sounds which is an important 1st step. Then I bought the Ultimate Mandarin book with the CD's to study on my own for six months on and off before my trip.
Mandarin is quite difficult because so many of the sounds don't exist in English compared to a language like Spanish. Also, unlike Spanish and other Western languages there are no significantly sounding similar words in Mandarin and English that sound and mean the same.
Although I enjoyed trying to speak Mandarin and like the sound of it I didn't like the way Ultimate Mandarin book and CD's worked. I think they are too difficult because the sentence structure in some exercises were too complex and longer than necessary for a beginner in Mandarin.
Other areas that I didn't like:
(1) The book or CD's don't specifically provide practice for all the possible sounds like my tutor made me do. Luckily, I had made a recording over several sessions with my tutor of the four tones for all the consonants and vowels that I could refer to when studying on my own. You only get to know some of them during the initial chapters.
(2) The Chinese on the CD's usually spoke very fast and I couldn't pick up the tones let alone the words. The exercises in the book are printed out in Pinyin, however, it is an approximation for Mandarin. Learning the Pinyin pronunciation of characters are difficult too. To help overcome my problems, I used Audacity freeware to edit the CD's lessons to MP3's files so I could slow the speaking rate to my level of understanding and more easily follow the written Pinyin exercises.
(3) The exercises for each chapter do not have all the vocabulary meanings in English at the end of each chapter or at the back of the book's master list. Instead many definitions are only explained in other chapters. Many are left out of the master list at the back of the book. The only way to find them, if possible at all, was to search the chapter table of contents. Although the English translation is provided for each Pinyin statement it wasn't always clear to me because the word order can be different between the languages. It was more useful to me to look up a word definition rather than use the English statement. I had to buy a Mandarin-English dictionary to help solve this serious deficiency in the book. This was very poor planning on the part of the editors of Ultimate Mandarin and aggravated me. We all have different methods of learning and Ultimate Mandarin did work well for me.
For a poor dumb language student such as myself, Ultimate Mandarin was too advanced and needlessly difficult. I did use the demo versions of Rosetta Stone and Before You Know It. I liked to use them in conjunction with the Ultimate Mandarin but I think at least for me, if I could have afforded to stay with a very patient tutor or have someone to talk with in Mandarin every day that would have been better in my situation.
So what happened during my trip to China? The few phrases I managed to remember, I was told that I was understandable. At other times, I confused and puzzled the Chinese I met. For instance, I did have a good laugh at myself at one restaurant when I was brought a bowl of hot water then another bowl of thin watery soup. I never figured out what I did wrong!
Customer Rating:
Summary: First Time Learner
Comment: I purchased this package, because I am interested in learning Madarin. I am fluent in Spanish, and have taken some other language courses. For the beginner this course is not extremely helpful. The course material is set up as a review, and not really for the first time learner.
The CD's are helpful, but the native speakers do not pause enough for you to really practice repeating the dialogue. There are two sets of CD's the home study set and the travel set. The home study set is pure Mandarin with no translations. The travel set has translations. Both sets are basically the same material, but the travel set is harder to work with. They modify the lesssons on the travel cd, and you can't really understand the modifications, because they deviated from the course material in the text.
If you are looking for a review package, I would say this might be helpful, but for the first time Mandarin student, don't expect too much from this package. You can get some great verbal pronunciation practice, because the native speakers provide you with many hours of Mandarin dialogue. But the course material is sort of like a first semester language class, minus the grammar rules. You'll start with phrases and dialoge right off. The vocabulary is very limited, but if you can pick up a good Mandarin course book, these language CD's would be a great supplement for a home study course.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for the beginner
Comment: For me, this package isn't well constructed.
Lets take lesson 1 for instance, the very first dialogue we are given is:
Wang xiaojie, hao jiu bu jian! Ni hao!
It then gives the whole conversation before giving the translation in English:
Miss Wang, I haven't seen you in a long time. Hello!
Ok, so how are we supposed to know what word means what when you consider that Mandarin word order is mostly not the same as English?
It then gives 32 words showing how different tones have different meanings. In the first lesson! Are we supposed to remember this?
The audio is very fast and confusing to use - you need to be pretty good with the FFWD and REW
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